


Faint of Heart

by hydropen



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Relationship, pack hunting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-23
Updated: 2012-07-23
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydropen/pseuds/hydropen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura was always the stronger one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faint of Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Because dead siblings give me feelings.
> 
> Unbeta-ed, so I apologize for any mistakes. Set in some vague future where the kanima plot has been concluded already. A bit angsty, but I always take fics with happy endings so...

The clearest memory Derek has of his sister is from one hot summer in their backyard. His father was inside making a mean strawberry lemonade, and his mother was with them playing catch, wearing her slightly disturbing predatory smile. Twice, the force of the frisbee whacked bruises into Derek’s palm, which hurt like Hades before the blue splotch receded into just a blurry memory.

The disk flew into the air again, and Derek raced Laura across the lush green grass, the blades drooping under the humid air. But he stumbled face first into the ground, and his ears twitched at the sound of his sister catching the object.  
  
Laura brandished the frisbee like a prize as she strode towards him. He stared up at her, not willing to leave the bed of kindly lawn grass, which didn’t shove his clumsiness in his face like a certain someone.  
  
“Beat you again,” she said with all the pompousness of an eight-year old child carrying a werewolf upgrade in her blood.  
  
“You’re older than me,” Derek whined.  
  
“Yeah well you’re a guy,” she said matter-of-factly as she nudged his forehead with her muddy toes. Derek flinched back.  
  
Across the yard, their mother was waving a hand, smiling at them under the syrupy sunshine, which enveloped them all in a sticky heat. Derek wiped the sweat off of his brow and leaped to his feet. Grabbing the frisbee in the blink of an eye he said, “Again.”  
  
Back at the patio with their mother, Derek was ready. Watching the frisbee unfold into the air like a sparrow, he sped after it with all the energy he could muster.  His bare feet raked up dirt as they propelled him forward. His heartbeat quickened with his pace. His footfalls sounded like a mammoth’s to his sharpening ears, and the barks of birds seemed to urge him forward.  Laura was behind him, he could feel it, and the Frisbee, gleaming white and sharp against the trees in the distance, was right there in front of him as he stretched out his hand—

A wolfish shadow leaped over him, caught the object between its teeth, and landed on the ground with a roll. The fur melted away into the summer haze, leaving behind the pink flesh of his sister.

“That’s cheating!” Derek cried out when he stopped in front of her.

“You can turn too,” Laura replied, dropping the disk from her mouth to stick out her tongue.

“Whatever, this is a stupid game. A stupid game for dogs.” He crossed his arms.

“We are dogs, silly,” Laura laughed as she got up and threw a hug at him. She was right of course. Derek squirmed, trying to appear like he didn’t like his stupid sister or her stupid laugh. He just accepted her embrace like a magnanimous brother. It’s not as if a dog was the worst thing Derek would be called in his lifetime.

…………………..

“You’d think we’d get at least one moment of peace here, but noooooo, we have to be living in some sadist’s idea of a monster-of-the-week creature feature,” Stiles says as he stares at Isaac’s prone body, half with fascination and half with horror.

“Quiet,” barks Derek, because he really doesn’t have the patience to deal with Stiles’ sarcasm, and a potentially dying pack member. And Derek sure as hell isn’t just some rubber costume out of a creature feature.

The werewolves, plus Scott’s human friends, are crowded around in Dr. Deaton’s clinic. The combined buzz of everybody’s anxiety in such close proximity makes Derek want to punch a hole in the wall and let in some air. He settles for growling at the caged animals in the room behind them, effectively shutting up their agitated cries.

The light from the overhead lamp barely illuminates the room in the hours before dawn. Lying underneath on the operating table is Isaac, unconscious, who seems to be the most at-peace person in the room. The spotlight makes his skin look even paler than normal, and it’s almost as if his face disappears under the blaze of white. He has no visible wounds, but his breathing is shallow, and Derek feels as if Isaac’s life force is barely tethered to this world. When the veterinarian reappears in the room, Derek verbally pounces on him.

“Will he live?”

Dr. Deaton looks at them all with his calm, steady gaze, and Derek wonders about what goes on inside that bald, mysterious head of his. “I don’t know how long it will be before he wakes up, but his condition is stable.”

Derek hears both Boyd and Erica let out a sigh of relief, and he wonders if he had been holding his breath unconsciously.

“Now,” Dr. Deaton continues, “I need you guys to tell me everything that happened. Every detail. Whatever did this to Isaac could bring down a werewolf, and chances are a human won’t get away quite as luckily.”

Scott, who looks shaken, turns to Stiles and Allison, both returning an encouraging look. Scott takes a deep breath and begins. “We were planning to hang out tonight, so we decided to take a walk through the woods. And part of the way through, I noticed that he,” Scott gestures towards Isaac’s near-motionless body, “was following us. I assumed he was just tailing us on your orders, because he kept his distance and tried to cover his scent.”

“We’d appreciate it next time if you said you wanted us to have a bodyguard so we don’t have to play I Spy, supernatural-style,” Stiles breaks in. But Derek hears his stuttered breathing and knows this jab is from nerves, not from spite, and he motions for Scott to continue.

“A couple minutes later I heard this really strange noise.” He scrunches up his eyebrows as he thinks. “It sounded like…me actually. But then I heard Isaac shouting, and I rushed over.”

“Even though you’re an idiot to go off alone,” Allison chastises.

“Well neither of you got hurt,” Scott replies. He looks back at Isaac, looking as if it was his own fault that something happened and not Derek’s for sending him off. “Just him. By the time I found him, I saw something furry lift its head from Isaac’s face. It was as if…it was sucking something. Then it ran off into the trees with the rest of its friends. Pretty big friends.”

“So there was more than one?” Boyd asks. Scott nods.

“Did you see how these things subdued him?” Dr. Deaton asks next, mulling over the information.

“Well, I saw that Isaac had some gashes along his arms and face,” Scott offers, waving his hand at the areas.

“Which are all healed by now,” Derek says as he looks at Isaac’s arms. The kid is wearing short sleeves, and there is no evidence of claw marks on his clothing.

“That makes it more difficult to identify these creatures,” notes Dr. Deaton. “But I am curious about how one was focusing on his head.”

Derek is curious about that too, but first he wants to hear the rest from Scott. It has been a long, hectic time since Derek first saved him from the hunters, and he knows, and may be slightly proud though he would never publicly admit it, that Scott is no longer a greenhorn at using his senses. “Did you smell anything?”

Scott just shakes his head, at a loss. “As I moved towards Isaac, the forest got foggier and foggier, and I couldn’t smell a thing.”

Derek takes a whiff of Isaac and is surprised to find nothing. “Something in the fog must cancel their scent.”

 “Then how are we supposed to find these monsters that did this to him?” Erica demands.

“We haven’t lost our sense of hearing,” Boyd says, giving Erica a reassuring nod. She nods back and, with the tight press of her red lips, just looks even more determined to rip apart whatever the culprit is.

“He’s right,” Derek is pleased to say, though he keeps the appraisal from his tone. “We’ll have to cover the forest in groups and listen for any signs of beasts too large to be natural inhabitants.”

“And what are you going to do when you find these creatures?” Dr. Deaton asks as he crosses his arms. His eyes remain calm, but Derek can tell that the man is still watching him carefully.

Derek just bares a bit of fang to drive the point home to everyone. “First we found out what they are. Then we kill them.”

…………………..

 

It isn’t until the next nightfall, when the things that go bump are more likely to come out, that they all gather just outside of the preserve to begin the hunt.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet, so our priority is gathering information. How they look, how they sound, how they behave. If you find one, don’t go blindly charging in, because there could be more in hiding. We go in teams of two,” Derek says, because he sure as hell isn’t going to let anyone join Isaac in his half-dead stupor.

When he says this, Scott inches towards Allison as if he is being the most discreet werewolf in the world, even though to everyone else it’s obvious what he wants without even smelling the pheromones in the air. Scott throws a glare at Derek to see if he dares to challenge Scott letting his dick drive his decisions.

“The last time you two had a mission together, you ended up doing the hanky-panky while the kanima ripped right out of the trunk.” Stiles is the one who broaches this, and Derek hasn’t heard that part of the story before. He looks pointedly at them.

Allison at least blushes. “It won’t happen again.” She cocks her crossbow up, and she appears a lot more menacing than Scott has ever been. “Not this time.”

Derek just nods curtly, trusting their previous experiences to keep them from screwing up royally, and moves on to the rest of them. “Boyd, you’re with Erica,” because the newest convert was cautious where Erica was brash. “Stiles, you’re with me,” because he didn’t see a human and a newbie werewolf making any sort of good combination against unknown assailants.

With everyone clear on their job, the pairs enter the woods and diverge, each disappearing into the midnight darkness. Soon, Derek and Stiles are only accompanied by soft hoots and calls of the nocturnal tenants. Their footsteps barely make a sound, muffled by fallen leaves and unpacked dirt. The air is crisp, and Derek inhales deeply.

The preserve is a source of a lot of bitter memories for Derek, but he can never hate it. In the summer, Derek and Laura would compete to see who could catch more squirrels, and in the autumn they would make gargantuan piles of leaves to leap into from the tree tops, like rulers of sky and earth. The never-ending treeline provided boundless days of fun when they were children. Back when they were invulnerable.

If Derek weren’t hunting down vicious werewolf-assaulting magical creatures at the moment, he would find their situation almost pleasant.

“It’s a dream come true partnering with you Derek,” Stiles says, breaking the verbal silence. He never seems to be able to keep his mouth shut, even when his only defense against the mysteries hidden amongst the trees is a flashlight. Well, and a werewolf too, though he doesn’t want Stiles to get complacent with that knowledge. “Always wanted another opportunity to save your werewolf ass.”

“I’ll leave you to get eaten if your chatter attracts them to our position,” Derek replies, with surprisingly less irritation than he expected.

Stiles seems to have noticed Derek’s lack of bite too, because he just continues, “Well the point is to find them, so if they come to us that’s all the better. I’ll run in the other direction while you distract them.”

Derek just makes an uncommitted grunt. As they move further into the woods with Derek at the head, they fall into step with each other. Stiles carefully treads behind where Derek steps to avoid any gnarled roots, and they continue through the thin trees at a matching pace. Then Derek suddenly feels like continuing the conversation, as if actually wants to hear more of Stiles’ nonsense instead of enjoying the peace and quiet he rarely gets when Scott’s friend is around. “I remember saving _your_ ass more often than the other way around.”

“You must be pretty fond of my ass then,” Stiles replies immediately.

Derek suspects that this is just another example of Stiles’ brain-to-mouth filter breaking again and not some sudden come-on, because first of all Derek is the grumpy, fanged werewolf, and second of all when he turns around he sees Stiles flailing like an idiot.

“That…came out completely the wrong way. I mean I meant, well—you know what I meant!” Stiles jabbers on, his face twisting like a contortionist from Cirque du Soleil.

It really is too entertaining. “No, I don’t know what you meant,” Derek replies, raising an eyebrow. When Stiles makes a noise that nears the squawk end of the weird-reaction spectrum, Derek just snorts. He turns around as a smile threatens to break across his face, and Derek starts walking again when he hears Stiles’ quietly exclaim, “Oh my God, you were making a funny.”

Derek wonders when their relationship changed from an exchange of death threats and body slams into a working, if begrudging, partnership, with only the occasional death threats and body slams. Maybe when Stiles kept his body afloat, treading water with 200 pounds of dead werewolf weight in his hands as a poisonous reptilianoid circled them like a vulture. Or maybe when Derek answered his call to help drag Scott’s body back home as the teen wolf drunkenly burped out that Stiles shed manly tears of manliness whenever he watched _Up_.

Despite Stiles being a spaz at times, he’s damn intelligent, and Derek respects him. And if he sometimes wonders if that respect is descending into some different emotional territory, well, now is not the time to think about that.

“Hey, do you feel a bit of an unnatural fog of doom coming on?” Stiles asks, slowing down his pace.

Derek isn’t sure where it came from, but he does see a grey haze envelope them all too suddenly.  “Stiles,” he says immediately, whipping around.

But no one is behind him. All that’s left is translucent wall of smoke, obscuring his vision. Derek lengthens his claws and crouches near the ground.

“Derek,” Stiles calls out from his left.

He snaps his head. The voice sounds odd; not nervous or frightened at all, even though Derek knows Stiles heard Scott talk about the fog the night before. He sounds just as he was conversing with Derek only minutes ago.

Derek knows he could be walking into a trap, but nonetheless he stalks towards the source of the sound. Stiles is his responsibility, and he won’t let him get hurt. He isn’t the tiptoeing  child anymore.

“Over here.”

It feels like Derek has been wandering for hours in the fog, but he knows that it’s only his senses becoming muddled as the grey haze keeps close to his skin. Getting frustrated, he call out, “Stiles—“

A shadow leaps at him from the side, and Derek barely jumps out of the away. But he’s not fast enough, and blood spurts out from his left arm.

It hits him from behind. Derek quickly swings his arm back, connecting with something furry. But a second shadow jumps at him and bites on his arm, even before his first wound has completely healed.

Derek looks at the attacker. It almost looks like a hyena, only larger, as big as a mountain lion. But he buries any caution underneath a raw anger, and Derek quickly shoves his claws deep into its neck. In a flash of fur it jumps back, whining in pain. But before he can catch his breath, the first one pounces on him, and Derek careens backward into a tree, knocking his head against the hard bark. His vision begins to swim, and the trees and sky oscillate like waves as his eyelids shut close.

…………………..

Laura was always the stronger one. She took to her lycan side like a tadpole climbing ashore as a frog, though everytime Derek called her frog she would shove him to the floor. It only took her a year through puberty to gain control over her transformations, while Derek suffered in chains every month throughout junior high and beyond, burdened by his human ineptitude and increasingly flimsy excuses of attending a funeral for a grandmother, an uncle, a niece, and so on. The irony.

Laura relished in her changes and abilities, not afraid to wow and woo her friends and teachers at school with her superhuman athletic skills and superhuman confidence. It was as if she had bypassed the awkward teen phase altogether, having conquered it along with her inner wolf. Meanwhile, Derek feared hurting his classmates with any wrong snap of his mouth or touch of his fingers, and kept his distance, especially when that time of month drew nigh.

“It’ll get better,” she whispered to him one morning after a particularly painful full moon. Sunlight filtered through the basement window and hovered over her hair like a halo. Laura held him close, and Derek found solace again in her warmth, no matter how many times he woke up fettered to the wall, fingers red and raw from clawing at the stone walls throughout the night.

Laura was right of course. Several years later, the full moon after their family was massacred, Derek’s anger ripped control of his body from his inner wolf, and he spent the night transformed but conscious, painfully aware that the flames which killed his family were eating his heart alive.

…………………..

Derek snaps his eyes open howls.

The ground vibrates, and the hyenas scramble back in shock. His jacket rips apart as his body bulges and convulses, culminating in the towering figure of the alpha. Bloodlust runs through his veins, and he stares into the green, fearful eyes of the now-diminutive beasts. Derek lunges towards them.

He pins down the first one with the weight of his body and kicks the other with a quick thrust of his feet. It scrambles back up but keeps its distance, circling him warily.

Derek directs all his rage towards the hyena underneath him. It looks helpless and pathetic, squirming underneath, but yesterday it was Isaac lying on the ground helpless. He opens his mouth and aims for its neck—

Only to be pushed off of the creature by two more of its kind. Derek is suddenly facing three of them, and they’re all about the same size as he is. But there’s still anger coursing through him, and he’s not going to back down. Derek jumps and meets them head-on in the air, only to be pushed back into the ground and restrained by three sets of claws. He tries to rip his arms out from underneath, but only succeeds in tearing open new wounds in his flesh.

The largest beast climbs onto his chest and stares down at his face. Derek growls, but it won’t move. It merely watches him with bright green eyes.

Then it opens its jaws and reveals a dark void within.

Derek feels his breath rising from his mouth; his heart is beating slower and slower. It’s not just his breath its taking; Derek feels his life slowly being sucked out of his body.

He wills at his limbs to move, but they’re as lifeless as he is about to become.

These thoughts flee from Derek’s head when he hears the beasts snap at something outside of his vision. The one on top of him jumps off, and Derek hears it growl. But he can’t tell what’s happening because he’s drifting off into a sea of black.

…………………..

“Do werewolves have souls?” Derek wondered one day, mixing batter in the kitchen.

Laura just preheated the oven and joined the inviting bag of chocolate chips at the table, leaving him to do the grunt work, that lazy dog. She didn’t even bother to clean up the bags of sugar and flour. “All humans have souls,” she replied, munching on the chocolate with a smile.

…………………..

_She’s standing in the distance, wearing her favorite blue sweater and uncombed hair like the mistress of Sunday mornings. But her face is blurred, like in Derek’s photograph where he rubbed his thumb over the ink too many times._

_“I killed him,” Derek shouts. He starts walking towards her, hoping Laura will hear him. “I killed Uncle Peter, your murderer. I’m the alpha now.” He begins to run._

_Derek can’t tell if her mouth opens or not, but he hears her say, “There’s nothing left for you here.”_

_“Laura!” he shouts, and now he’s transformed, leaping across the great emptiness between them._

_“Always be proud of who you are,” Laura says, echoing her last words to him before he ran away to New York, hoping for a clean slate. She gives him the same smile as always, soft like linen and wicked as the wind, only this time a little sadder._

_Derek runs faster. With one human hand, he reaches out to touch her. But his fingers only wrap around a shadow where she once stood, dispersed into nothingness._

_And then he’s falling through cracks he can’t see, into a gaping chasm underneath. There’s nothing to_ _grab onto, except a belief that there’s something left for him at the bottom._

_A bright light engulfs him._

…………………..

The first thing Derek does when he wakes is grab the living thing closest to him. He snatches something warm. “What happened?” he tries to say, but it comes out as a hoarse cough.

“Ow.” It’s Stiles’ small wrist, and Derek feels some anxiety seep out of his body. “Injured people are normally better off resting than injuring other people.”

Derek turns his head to yell something back, or at least attempt a syllable with a throat that feels like a rusted pipeline. But he shuts his mouth when he sees Stile’s face loom over him.

His eyes are steeped with worry, which is a lot different from the last time he took care of a dying Derek, and his tired face is topped with blood-soaked gauze over his left cheek. When Stiles sees Derek looking at his wound he says, “I really don’t know how I’m going to explain that to my dad. Maybe I’ll just tell him you beat me up; you make a good scape-goat, got the right face for it. You must be thirsty,” he says, finally shutting up as he uncaps a water bottle and places it on Derek’s lips.

Derek doesn’t realize how thirsty he is until he sees the bottle, and he greedily opens his mouth. Some water manages to get down his throat, and the rest dribbles down his chin.

 They’re in Derek’s warehouse hideout, empty of any other people. Thankfully, it’s Stiles here taking care of him. He’s already seen Derek weak and half-dead on more than one occasion, and Derek can’t afford to have his newly-formed pack see him like this. Realizing that he’s safe, Derek tries to pick himself up from the bed. But his elbow buckles, and he falls back into the mattress.

Stiles shakes his head and puts his hands on his hips, as if his bossing stance would actually be any effective. “Nuh-uh, you won’t make it two steps on your feet, the vet said so. Apparently you’re in better condition than Isaac, but you still almost got soul-sucked and he says you need to get some bed rest.”

Derek rolls onto his side and glares upward. “No, I need to get to Boyd and Erica—“

“Who are perfectly fine right now. Doing a lot better than you actually. Peachy keen, I might even say. When the crocottas ran away, Scott told Allison and me to bring you back here, while he had your wolf buddies tail the hyena-things. A couple were bold enough to sneak to the edge of town, so the pack’s patrolling ‘til dawn. Except Allison ‘cause, you know, hunter parents and all. But she did help me drag your heavy ass back here,” Stiles manages to finish in one breath.

“Just stop,” Derek says, trying to achieve menace with a scratchy voice. He can’t process all of this information at once because his head is still a little dazed. “Crocottas?”

“Yeah, when we stopped by the vet’s first, I used his computer. When we got separated, I heard my voice in the woods. But obviously not my voice, cause I didn’t say anything. So I followed it, and I find you getting your ass kicked by the creatures. So I figured they mimic people’s voices. A couple key and mouse clicks later, bam! We got ourselves a crocotta infestation.”

Derek nods slowly. It explains Scott’s first encounter with them too. Now that Derek knows what they’re dealing with, he won’t get tricked again.

“So…,” Stiles asks, “you’re not going to thank me?”

Derek looks back at him in confusion. When he sees that Stiles is being serious he says, “For what?”

“Cleaning your toilet. No really, saving your life. Again,” Stiles replies, flopping up his arms. Derek just makes a _How?_ look with his raised eyebrows. “Seriously, you didn’t see me save the day? When they were in the middle of feasting on your soul, I threw some mountain ash onto them and they started burning like crazy. From, you know, the power of imagination or whatever Dr. Deaton thinks it is. And then Scott and Allison show up, ‘cause I called for backup, and they managed to drive them away. Plus, I got you out of your bloody clothes, and when you’re stiff as a corpse, that’s like prying off skin. But less graphic. Wow I think I just made myself throw up a little.”

Derek glances downward. He is stripped of everything except his boxers, which are soaked in cold sweat. Looking back up, he sees Stiles turn his head a little with a blush creeping onto his cheeks. Stiles’ heart rate is elevated, and Derek tries not to think about his hands all over his body. Now is not the time to think about it, though there never seems to be a time to think about it.

Derek just says, “Thank you.”

When Stiles hears this, he looks, well, flabbergasted. But then his face bursts into a big grin, as if he just had just solved world hunger. “If only I could record that for posterity.” Derek rolls his eyes, but grins a little too.

That must have made Stiles more confident, because he puts his hands on Derek’s shoulders and pushes him back onto the bed. Derek feels Stiles’ breath tip-toe across his face, and his eyes dart up to Stiles’ parted mouth.  Some part of him, whether it’s the wolf or Derek himself, wants to close the distance and taste his warmth, his energy, something nicer than blood. Derek knows that as alpha he could easily take Stiles, later if not now, but Stiles is straightening back up, and the feral impulse dissipates. Derek stills feel an ache though when Stiles moves away to grab a stool, and he wonders if it really is the werewolf side that’s more difficult to control.

“Now that you’re up to speed,” Stiles begins, “mind telling me why you ignored your own orders of ‘this is purely reconnaissance let’s not get killed tonight’ and then _almost get yourself killed_?”

Derek frowns. “I’m the alpha,” he replies, because that should cover any other questions he expects to come out of Stiles’ mouth.

“Yes I know, you’ve only said it about a hundred times.” Derek can still make him flinch with just his physical presence, but Stiles has always been stronger with words and nearly fearless when an idea latches onto his head. It doesn’t help that most of his arguments are right. “But that doesn’t make you Clark freaking-indestructable-except-for-kryptonite Kent. You have limits, just like everyone else.”

Derek’s scowl grows bigger. “I’m not everyone else. I’m _the alpha_.”

“Hundred-and-one times,” Stiles says. He flails his arms, as if that would drive his point in better. “Yes, but you’re not just a werewolf. You’re human too.”

“It wasn’t the human part of me that killed Peter Hale or saved you from the kanima, and it won’t be what will protect the town from the crocottas,” Derek replies.

Stiles opens his mouth, gaping. But he regains his words and replies, “Well as a werewolf you have a pack to help you deal with your were-business, alright, and weren’t you the one who said strength in numbers? You have people you can rely on.” Derek thinks he hears _you have me to rely on_ hanging in between them, but Derek is ill and he knows neediness projects.

“When my sister died,” Derek forges on, “I could have cried. I could have torn my eyes out. But that wouldn’t have stopped the alpha and avenge her. Human emotions hold me back. Humans are weak,” he finally bites out.

Stiles just looks at him with bitterness in his eyes. “I’m pretty sure the human that saved your ass isn’t fucking weak.”

Derek wants to take what he said back, because Stiles is hurt and doesn’t know that Derek’s talking about himself. He wants to tell him about the kid who fell for a beautiful lady with fire in her hands. He wants to tell him about the kid who had no room for his sister’s forgiveness when shame took root in his heart. He wants to explain his world to Stiles, but all that comes out is, “I’m sorry.”

Stiles looks sorry. “Werewolves have their wolfsbane too.” He sighs. “That was bad of me, getting you riled up when you’re half-dead.”

Derek takes a long look at him and says, “I would have been completely dead if it wasn’t for you.” He doesn’t know if this fixes everything he said, but it doesn’t matter because fatigue suddenly overtakes him, and his head sinks into the pillow.

“Yeah, sleep might be good for the both of us,” Stiles replies softly. He moves to get up, but Derek instinctively grabs his wrist.

“Stay with me,” Derek murmurs, exhaustion dissolving any reserve he has left with Stiles. When he feels a hand cover his own, Derek closes his eyes and lets everything fades away.

…………………..

Sometimes Derek wondered what his sister would do as alpha. His cocky, infuriating sister, who always hid the Oreos from him, who kicked his ass in Super Smash Bros., who dragged him to a poetry reading and slipped him his first condom with just a sage nod of her head. Who bared her fangs at wild beasts when he was too scared to move. Who was first to comfort him and last to leave him.

_“I’m here, silly,” Laura says._

_They’re seated side by side on the rich green lawn behind their house, before the fire quieted the home and yellowed the grass. The air is heavy with heat and the buzzing of bees, heavy with the scent of lemonade, and Derek almost chokes on it. “Laura.”_

_“No shit. Now why are you dreaming about me when you can have some juicy fantasies with that cute Stiles—“_

_Derek whips his head around and glares. Her face is still blurry, but he can see her mussed hair and twinkling smile. “I know you’ve always wanted to hook me up with someone, but not him, not now.” He doesn’t know what to say next, so he just babbles out, “I can’t afford to have anyway weaknesses—“_

_“Okay first of all, a hallucination can’t make you do anything or anyone. And Stiles isn’t your weakness—you are.” She looks at him pointedly. “At least he can accept who he is. Not that he should have issues or anything when he’s running around with idiots.”_

_Derek growls in annoyance._

_Laura shrugs. “I don’t get why you’re getting so nostalgic now anyways. You’ve always dealt with your past with your claws.”_

_Derek looks out into the distance at the trees lining the field, protecting them from the outside. Or caging him in. “I wasn’t there with you…in the end. I just want to live up to you.”_

_“It’s not me you should worry about,” she replies, placing a hand on his cheek. It’s fleetingly warm, and he wants to catch it, but before he can move she says, “Wake up, Derek.”_

…………………..

The warehouse is empty when Derek opens his eyes. If he concentrates, he can feel a trace of Stiles’ warmth on his hand.


End file.
